I take my carpool lane very seriously and I hate cheaters. While there is some enforcement on the three person car pool lane on the 520 westbound there is not enough. There is a phone number but I haven't called anyone in, yet. But I've been close. Being the tech workers that we are we have even experimented with camera phones but the resolution is too low to capture the head count in the car and the license plate.

(And for all you pet lovers, your dog does not count as a third person).

Fortunately those privacy invading Brits have found the answer. From Engadget, [Infrared] Cameras to catch carpool lane cheaters:

It seems that the Brits are unsurprisingly trying to save money in their quest to ticket carpool lane cheaters. Actually having police do enough monitoring to act as a real deterrent is pretty costly so they decided to let a camera do the work. In pursuit of that goal Laser Optical Engineering has developed an infrared camera that exploits a small range of the infrared spectrum that is absorbed by human skin but reflected by all the non-organic parts of a car.

While not enough enforcement is one of my complaints about the 520 carpool lane, the other is that they placed it on the right hand side of the highway. Presumably they did this because busses use the lane and if it was on the left they'd have to cut across a lot of traffic to get to the few stops on the highway. Unfortunately this means that at every on ramp you have an incredibly high number of single occupancy cars cutting across the carpool lane which has an average speed of ~80km/hr to get to the non-carpool lanes with an average speed of ~20km/hr. Of course, accidents ensue.

What they should have done is build the bus stops into the middle of the highway with pedestrian overpasses. Either that or they need to just move the lane to the left and let the busses, which are fewer in number than the cars merging left, merge right. Having a carpool lane on the right hand side of the highway is simply inefficient.
2:15:33 PM   []